FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Guantanamo Bay detainee transferred to New York

Now we know where Obama will put the terrorists

So it begins. The Obama administration has made its first transfer of a detainee at the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to United States soil.

Ahmed Ghailani, arrived in New York early Tuesday to be tried in federal court in lower Manhattan for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 224 people.

Ghailani’s transfer to New York trial is an important first step in the implementation President Obama’s decision to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay even though we still haven’t been told where Obama will put the terrorists when he closes GITMO.

According to military prosecutors, after the August 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Ghailani worked for Al Qaeda as a document forger, trainer at a terror camp and bodyguard to bin Laden, according to military prosecutors. He was categorized as a high-value detainee by U.S. authorities after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004 and was transferred to the detention center at the U.S. naval base in Cuba two years later.

Obama brings this Guantanamo detainee to the United State, despite the fact that by a better than 2-to-1 margin, Americans oppose closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility and moving some of those prisoners to the United States:

Americans are especially resistant to closing the prison and transferring the terrorism suspects to prisons in their own states — only 23% favor this, while 74% are opposed. That represents a nine-point falloff from the 32% who support moving prisoners to the United States (with no specific location mentioned). Thus, even a segment of Americans who in general support closing Guantanamo are opposed to moving its terrorism suspects to prisons in their own “backyard.”